How To Optimize YouTube Keywords For Your Corporate Video

YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine. Each month the site recieves over 1 billion visits with people searching for content.

That’s a lot of potential eyeballs for your business.

It’s a big opportunity but YouTube is also highly competitive. To ensure your video prominently appears – rather than your competition – it is important to implement proper keyword tagging.

Read on to learn how to correctly tag your corporate video on YouTube.

#1 Use The Same Tags Across Your YouTube Channel

It’s recommended that you select a set of keywords which you will repeat in your tags across all of the videos that you want to rank for. This can increase the probability that a video will appear in the suggested column on the right hand side of the screen. If multiple people in your organization are uploading videos to YouTube then make sure to have a shared work document that lists all of the keywords that need to be included.

#2 Place Your Most Important Keywords First

YouTube in the past has suggested that the keywords that you most want to rank for should be entered first. It is unclear whether YouTube is still giving priority to these keywords. However, to be safe it is best practice to place the keywords you would most like to rank for first.

#3 Add In Misspellings

If there are common misspellings for the topic of your video you may want to add these into your tags in as well. These common misspellings may be easier to rank for as it is unlikely that many other videos will be targetting them.

#4 Update The Keywords

YouTube recommends updating your keywords on a regular basis to keep your video current with any new trends. Unfortunately, you cannot select how your keywords are placed. And as we saw in tip #2 we want to get those priority keywords near the beginning. To overcome this problem first copy and paste all of the keywords in your description onto a text file. Reorder them inside of a text file, adding in any new relevant keywords and then paste them back into YouTube.

#5 Remove Irrelevant Keywords

It can be tempting to simply add in a bunch of keywords hoping that “something sticks”. Don’t do it! You want your keywords to accurately depict the content of your video. Keywords which are misleading can lead to viewer drop off will decrease your watch time. This in turn can hurt both your YouTube SEO and your brands perception with your audience.

#6 Research Your Competition

Finally, it can be a good idea to use competing videos for inspiration. In 2012 YouTube decided to remove the tags section from the video watching page. This meant that it was no longer possible to easily see the tags that a video was ranking for. This was in repsonse to a number of people copying other peoples tags and then replicating them on their own video. While it is no longer quite as easy to discover what tags your competition are using it is still possible.

Here’s how to find the tags for a video (using our video for Walmart as an example)

Step One: Using Chrome or Firefox navigate to the video whose tags you would like to discover.

Step Two: Right click the mouse and from the drop down menu select “View Page Source”

Step Three: Once the page source has been displayed click on “CTRL-F” to bring up the find option. Type in “keywords” into the box.

Step Four: Next to the keywords you should find a list of tags for that video.

Do not simply copy these keywords. Some will be irrelevant for your video and as we saw in tip #5 irrelevant keywords are a serious no-no. Instead use these keywords as inspiration and choose only those which match your own video’s content.

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